Archive for ‘HTC’

Finally GoogleChic and I are going to agree on something. Apple and Google have teamed up on a $500 million bid to acquire Kodak’s patent portfolio. The two companies are aiming to buy Kodak’s 1100 imaging patents out of bankruptcy as reported by Bloomberg.

Initially, according to reports, Apple and Google were leading separate consortiums bidding for Kodak’s patents – Apple with Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures and Google with its mobile hardware buddies Samsung, LG and HTC. It seems like Apple and Google may have learnt their lesson after their head on fight for Nortel patents last year (Google lost after offering $900 million while Apple, RIM and Microsoft shelled out a chunky $4.5 billion dollars).

The patents that Kodak is selling as part of its bankruptcy proceedings, relate to capture, manipulation and sharing of digital images. In the future, the company plans to focus on printing and enterprise services and less on photography. Kodak claims that the patents may be worth more – $2.2 billion to $2.5 billion and Kodak has made more than $3 billion in revenue by licensing its patents to companies like Samsung, Nokia, LG, Google, Nokia among others. The two behemoths, Apple and Google may be getting the best deal now that they are not competing with each other.

The research firm Canalys in its new report indicates that HTC is the leading smart phone vendor in the United States based on third quarter shipments by major vendors including Apple, Samsung and HTC. With a range of 4G Android devices, HTC has quickly built a popular brand in a few short years. On a worldwide scale, Samsung has overtaken Apple to the top spot with a 49% year on year growth. Quite impressive!

The September quarter as we all know, has not been very good for Apple due to its failure to meet street expectations mostly due to the (late) launch of the iPhone 4S instead of the iPhone 5. I would be interested to see which of the companies do the best during holiday sales, given that Apple usually takes the crown for the holiday quarter.

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If Apple’s 5GB of iCloud is not enough, then check out Box.net who is throwing in a free 50GB for iOS users. The deal starts on Friday 10/14 at 12:01 AM PST and runs for 50 days. All you need to do is download the app on your iDevice and the storage space will be your forever! With Airplay, you can also wireless-ly stream your Box.net content to your TV. I’m jumping from the DropBox bandwagon to the Box.net wagon. What about you?

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It looks like Apple is trying to alienate the themselves from the world. They’re suing everyone left and right for patent infringe. Right now they have an ongoing lawsuit with HTC, Samsung and Motorola. HTC did get some bad news recently, the International Trade commission made some initial determination that HTC did infringe on two out of the ten patents that is in dispute. HTC’s general counsel Grace Lei recently stated this “HTC is disappointed at Apple’s constant attempts at litigations instead of competing fairly in the market.” Pretty much, stop wasting everyone’s time and resources, and start putting your brains together to come up with the next best thing! With all the money that they’re spending on legation, they could have invested that in the technology instead. I mean come on, most recently, they copied Android’s notification system 😉

As for Samsung, thanks to the bitter battles over the patents, their relationship with Apple is not looking very bright. There are reports that Apple is soon going to stop using them as their chip supplier; Samsung currently supplies the A5 chip for the iPhone. Instead, Apple is turning to TSMC a Taiwanese chip maker to supply their chips.

BY THE APPLE GIRL

HTC is not new to patent infringement. If only, HTC had invested its resources in making an original phone, it could have saved itself $5 per phone that it pays Microsoft for patent infringement along with the royalty that it might have to pay Apple.

As Steve Jobs says “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

I think Apple is doing the right thing by going after all the phone manufacturers and claiming its right to the intellectual property it created. GoogleChic, are you hinting that Apple should come up with the next best thing so Android users get a free pass to it? 🙂

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For every Android phone it sells, HTC has agreed to pay $5 to Microsoft over intellectual patent infringement. Although it is not clear on the area of infringement, those close to the company indicate that the infringement broadly applies in areas ranging from the user interface to the underlying operating system. HTC also makes Windows phones but apparenty thats irrelevant.

So there you go, Microsoft has found its way into making some $$ from Android.

BY THE GOOGLE CHIC

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 OS obviously is far less superior than Android which is why they’re trying to make some $$ off Android 🙂

It seems like everyone is suing each other these days. Apple filed a suit in April claiming that Samsung stole the “look and feel” of the iPhone and iPad.

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Are you someone that can’t live without a keyboard? Looks like you’re not alone, because Sprint released the HTC EVO Shift 4G. You guessed it, the EVO with a keyboard! You can get it for $89.99 via amazonwirless with a new Sprint contract, not a bad deal compared to the $149.99 price tag if purchased via Sprint.

I have to say this is not a bad phone at all if you’re looking for a phone that can give you some decent processing power without having to pay an arm and a leg. However, if you’re a power user, you may want to wait for those dual core phones releasing in the next couple of months 🙂

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So if you’re like me, you’ve been going gaga about the HTC Desire HD and the HTC Sense UI. Then you realize that it wont’ be released in the US! Upon, a closer look the EVOish device that was leaked on BGR last month sure looks very similar to the HTC Desire. The EVOish device clearly sports a dual flash and a 8 mega pixel camera. Other than the lack of the unified aluminum body the EVOish device sure looks like the Desire HD. I’m crossing my fingers because the Desire HD is to die for! If the rumors are true the phone will be released on Verizon and I may just jump ship to get this phone!

The combination of the hardware and HTC Sense makes the Desire HD extremely powerful, it sports a 4.3 in screen with HD video recording. And for sharing those videos on your home TV there’s DLNA support (HTC makes a nice sly advertisement for their HTC media hub in their video. Didn’t I just say DLNA is the way to go 🙂 ).

Being able to easily control your ringer volume, tag and upload pictures to Flickr and Facebook are the nice touches about the Sense UI that makes it super user friendly. There’s also HTCSense.com, it’s perfect for someone like me (I’m a major klutz)! There are some mornings which things just doesn’t go my way, I’m running late can’t find my phone and of course the ringer is on vibrate (since I set it to automatically vibrate during work hours, usually it’s a good feature but sometimes it does back fire on me). Well, with HTCSense.com I can log on to their website and turn my ringer back on :). Another really good feature is being able to set up call forwarding and receiving text messages via their website (for those days you just plain forget to bring your phone) . Check out the video for the rest of the features.

BY THE APPLE GIRL

GoogleChic, I am glad that you finally liked an Android device (other than your Nexus) that you would like to own 😀

The HTC Desire HD is far from pushing the iPhone from its top dog spot! HTC Desire, with its aluminium construction is way off from beating Apple’s iconic steely edge curves and sheer glass finish. I am just glad for you that HTC seems to have made a sturdier phone than the cheap plasticy Samsung Galaxy S phones.

GoogleChic, don’t you want super AMOLED anymore? I can guarantee you that you are going to kick yourself for buying this phone (with me flashing the iPhone Retina Display at every opportunity :)). Thank god, you have DLNA on the phone to stream to your big screen HDTV (to make up for the lack luster LCD display on the phone)! I just hope it works as flawlessly as AirTunes (or as AirPlay will)!

Have you heard of Apple’s Mobile Me? The cloud based service that pushes mail, contacts, calendar to all your iDevices automatically. It also allows you to find the iPhone, remotely wipe it or display a message as well as remotely control the ringer volume (Yes GoogleChic, Apple thought of it before HTC did :D). It also comes with Mobile Me Gallery to share your photos, a huge iDisk to store all your files online as well as Me.com to access to all your information that you have stored on the cloud through your web browser. Isn’t that what Google Chrome Tab is all about? I’m glad fAndroids are finally getting excited about things which (ahem ahem!) are “not so new” to AppleFanboys 😀 Mobile Me costs $99 a year for all those extensive features. Or you could try the 60 day free trial and get hooked to Apple’s quality of service!

The cached maps is a paid feature on the Desire. Please tell me you would rather pay for a well known navigation service like Tom Tom App or Magellan App! After the break down, the only cool feature I see on the HTC Desire HD is the automatic volume control based on the surroundings, that is built into the phone. And just yesterday we featured Apps with super cool volume control features!